Tag Archives: history

Today is the 51st anniversary of the assassination of JFK. And I’m old enough to remember the day.

The first hint of something big happening occurred when we caught glimpses of teachers standing together, heads bent close so they could hear something on a portable transistor radio (look it up…they were quite big at the time.) A short time later, a teacher came into the room and I remember her announcement. (Odd that I can’t remember who she was but her words still are lodged in my head.) “Children, we have some very sad news…”

They sent us home from school early. And I remember the whole long weekend of grief, the families being together, the funeral on TV, an entire nation in grief. I think the children learned how to feel from the adults, and what we mainly learned was that in this case, the adults didn’t seem to know how to feel either. Except that they were in shock. Something we did not understand, nor did they, but it got under our skin and stayed lodged in our minds, a critical dimension of the event. “Even our parents were crying!..”

It was my own first experience of grief, of something this powerful. I don’t think I ever got over it, or that many of us did. Later catastrophes that “everyone remembers where they were” for, pale in comparison. Perhaps after the first really bad one, your capacity for that kind of numbing shock is altered. Because it’s the first one that teaches you something you never knew before: your world can alter suddenly, irrevocably, even horribly.

After that time, you just know it. That awareness is forever part of you.